Pharus felt a great sense of anticipation building in him. He was at once cold and hot, hungry for something he could not put into words. His gauntlets creaked, as he clenched and loosened his hands in strange expectation. ‘What is that sound? Can you hear it?’
‘All dead things hear it. Nagash calls to you, on the wind and in your bones.’
Pharus twitched, feeling a sudden need, an urge, to turn and walk until he was commanded to stop. He could not resist it and did not wish to. ‘I am… hungry,’ he said, his voice no more than a whisper. ‘Thirsty. It hurts.’ Not as bad as it had, though. The war-plate he wore might be a cage, but it kept the pain at bay. Even so, he could still feel the storm, surging within him, seeking escape. He traced the hourglass shape on his chest-plate.
‘It will grow worse. Pain is the price we pay, to serve the Great Work. Even Nagash feels it – and your pain is but a shadow of his own. Remember that, Pharus Thaum. Remember that you are but a shadow of the Undying King, a part of him now and forevermore. When he reaches out, it is with a thousand hands, and you are one of them.’
‘Yes.’ The word felt wrong, somehow. Pharus’ hand fell to the sword now belted at his waist, in a sheath of rotting leather. It was a wide blade, meant for brute strength rather than finesse. Its hilt had been carved from a femur, and its crosspiece was made from the fangs of some large beast. Both the blade and the hourglass pommel had been made from some sort of dark, impossibly hard crystal – shadeglass, Arkhan had called it. It seemed to flex in eagerness as he gripped the hilt, and the sands in the hourglass hissed weirdly.
He hesitated, feeling the malignant hunger roiling within the deceptively crude weapon – the weapon longed to part flesh and gorge itself on the final moments of the dying. And part of him longed to allow it to do so. He realised Arkhan was watching him. ‘You understand now, I think,’ the liche said.
‘I understand nothing. I know nothing. But I…’ Pharus hesitated. ‘It does not seem so important to know, as it did earlier.’ He flexed his gauntlets, watching the haze of his substance flicker through the gaps in the iron plates. For a moment, he wondered if he was no more than a memory of who he had been. He felt a spark of anger flicker within him.
Before it could ignite, Arkhan said, ‘You have been remade, and all useless parts of you have been cast aside. If you have questions, it means he wishes you to ask them.’
‘Will he send me against Azyr?’
‘Do you wish him to do so?’
‘What I wish is not important.’
‘Good. You are learning.’ Arkhan sounded pleased.
‘Yes. I remember more of who I was. What I was.’ Pharus looked at him. ‘I also remember that you are the reason that Nagash spared me. He wished to destroy me. But you did not. Why?’
Arkhan glanced at him. ‘Tell me – what do you know of Nagash?’
Pharus hesitated. ‘He is… all.’ What else was there to know? Nagash was the sum totality of all things. All things were one, in him. Or so the voice beating in his brain insisted with monotonous rhythm.
Arkhan extended his staff. ‘Look to the east. What do you see?’
Pharus looked and saw an unlight – a black sun, squirming against the dark curtain of the sky. It boiled and burned amid the ruins, eating away at the world around it. It swelled and receded with the voice in his head, and he found himself unable to look away. Vastation built in him, purging his lingering uncertainties.
‘Nagash is the black sun – the true sun’s shadow and twin,’ Arkhan said. ‘As Sigmar holds the sky suspended, so too does Nagash draw down the earth. They move in eternal opposition, pushing against one another.’
‘I do not understand.’
Arkhan’s teeth clicked in what might have been an expression of amusement. ‘In some ancient texts, the black sun illuminates the truth of the soul. Nagash is the totality of truth – an absence of all lies, even the most comforting. He is the black sun, burning in an inverted sky. He is the truth, and Sigmar, the lie. Sigmar is a husk, filled with falsehood. He demands much and gives little in return. Nagash, at least, offers justice.’
‘Justice,’ Pharus echoed. He looked down at himself. ‘Is this justice?’
Arkhan laughed. ‘This is Nagashizzar. The place of final justice.’ He stopped and thumped the ground with his staff. ‘We are here.’
They had come to a long avenue that stretched eastwards, towards the black sun. It had been cleared of much of the rubble, but work-gangs of skeletons still toiled along the edges. Clusters of bodiless spirits – chainrasps and flickerhaunts, gallarchs and lane-hags, scregs and flay-braggarts, masses of drifting, moaning spectres – bunched and floated through the ruins to either side, responding to the same call that drew Pharus.
‘What is this place?’ Pharus asked.
‘We approach the base of the Black Pyramid. Here, the Undying King has set his throne, so that he might receive the oaths of fealty owed him, by his most loyal servants.’ Arkhan turned west, towards the closest end of the avenue. ‘There, see? Three of the most prominent come now, to kneel at the Undying King’s feet – at their head comes Vorgen Malendrek, the Knight of Shrouds.’
A silent host of deathly riders paraded down the avenue, past Pharus and Arkhan. At their head was a towering figure – darkly magnificent, balefire bleeding from his eyes, wrapped in spectral shrouds. He wore a black iron helm, topped by great, curving bat wings, and bore a fine sword belted to his hip, an hourglass set into the hilt.
‘Like you, Malendrek once served the God-King,’ Arkhan said. ‘And like you, he has seen the truth of Sigmar’s perfidy.’ He sounded almost amused. He pointed. ‘And there, Crelis Arul, the Lady of All Flesh.’ Behind Malendrek’s nighthaunt riders came a shuffling tide of rotting flesh. The deadwalkers moved with no grace or precision, stumbling along like confused livestock. The greatest mass of them bore upon their backs and shoulders a palanquin made from bone and raw, bloody flesh.
The woman seated atop the hideous palanquin was draped in rotting and stained finery as of ancient days, her features hidden behind a crudely stitched leather mask. Two great dire wolves, their ribcages showing through tattered fur and their skulls bare to the moonlight, crouched to either side of her. Occasionally she stroked one or the other of them, as if they were living things.
She raised a crumbling hand as if in greeting, and Arkhan returned the gesture. Then, he turned and lifted his staff. ‘And last but not least – save perhaps in his own mind – Grand Prince Yaros, Lord Rattlebone.’
The deathrattle warriors who brought up the rear of the column marched as one, in perfect synchronisation. They bore heavy kite shields and long spears, to which had been affixed rotted pennants. Archaic armour sheathed the brown bones, and the rhythmic clamour of their passing was all but deafening.
At their head rode a princely figure, wearing a battered crown of iron and a cloak of dusty fur. The Deathrattle King rode a skeletal steed and had a single-bladed axe balanced across his saddle. He lifted the axe in salute as he passed.
‘Three lords of death, come to serve he who forged them.’
‘Where are they going?’